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Something I’ve often toyed with aside from my own game FateStone was the idea of re-creating a Dungeons & Dragons campaign in something like RPG Maker. Seems easy right? You’ve got dungeons, monsters, characters all there and ready to go! However, the big hurdle is quite simply that the way combat works does not overlap. Like at all. RPG Maker’s combat calculations are more inspired by Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest than anything you’d find in a Pen & Paper RPG tome. So I recently put my mind to work on figuring out how exactly you would be able to bring a d20 or D&D Style of combat to a RPG Maker game.

Now take in mind that this is a very basic version of what I started working with. While I have started working on versions to incorporate all the different D&D ability scores, I haven’t hammered out all the nitty gritty of using them. So for now I strictly went for Attack Roll (Attack) vs AC (Defense) and Spell Attack (Magic Attack) vs Saving Throw (Magic Defense).

First is the dice roll:

1dX = Math.randomInt(X)+1

YdX = Math.randomInt((X*Y), Y) + 1

For the YdX formula, it’s important to note that you’ll be setting the range of the random numbers, when it says X*Y you should replace that with the actual value of X * Y. In other words, for 3d6 don’t put (6 * 3) just put (18). These formulas will be used for everything from determining the attack to the damage, so they are pretty much the cornerstone of this whole thing. But another important one would be how to you get the Ability Modifier from the Ability Score. For that you’ll want to use the following calculation:

Math.Floor((A – 10)/2) = M

A = Ability Score. M = Ability Modifier.

In simple terms, you subtract 10 from the Score, divide that by 2 and round down (because you always round down in D&D) and that will give you the modifier. So an Attack (Strength) of 14 would result in a modifier of 2.

So how would this work for an actual skill? Well, let’s take a look at one. First, you’ll want to set the Skill in RPG Maker to be a ‘Certain Hit’. We are just going to skip the whole Accuracy/Evade cycle of the attack in favor of our own math. Then our damage formula will look something like this:

Naturally, you can probably imagine how this basic formula can be applied to a lot of different things. It forms the basic idea for skill checks, saving throws, and pretty much any Difficulty Check based roll. You could replace the target defense with a d20 roll on the enemy side as well and have an opposed check.

As I said at the top, this isn’t perfect. It doesn’t quite yet take into account D&D’s Ability Scores, which I’m still working on. Mostly just stuck on thinking of a way to make the Target Defense side of things work when b.def would simply be their Constitution score or something.

If I ever figure out a good solution to it, I will let you know.

In the mean time, you might find the following plug ins for RPG Maker MV to be handy when it comes to recreating the D&D experience:

Yanfly’s Weapon Unleash: Allows you to reassign a different attack skill to different weapons, thus being able to give daggers a different damage formula than a great axe.

Yanfly’s Limited Skill Usages: For those interested in bringing D&D 4th Edition’s system of At-Will, Encounter and Daily abilities to the game, this plugin can help. However, you might want to create a common event for sleeping that gets called when using an item like ‘Camping Set’ or something to reset the Daily uses.

What is the Land of Odd?

Long ago, in like 2007, someone told this nutjob named Vrykerion that he should try writing down all his weird rants and observations about MMOs, video games, cartoons, D&D, comics and a bunch of other geeky things. He did. This is it. Welcome to the Land of Odd.